idworks1's comments

Five years ago, I've used common software to do this. I had to take hundreds of pictures of a scene, getting as many angles and details possible. Then when you pass it to the computer. Stitching it all together took well beyond 24 hours.

Now that I had a 3d model of the scene, I had to spend countless hours cleaning it up to make sure it was useable. Maybe in the last 5 years, things have improved.

But this demo used 4 pictures. And apparently, it rendered the final image in seconds. That's what's new.

When customers picked up their orders from our warehouse, they signed the A4 sized receipt. We made a copy using a photocopier, and kept our copy in a box. Then the following month, we moved the box into a pallet. When the pallet was full of these boxes, we shrink-wrapped it and fork-lifted it into a shelf in the warehouse. After a few years, they had pallets after pallets of receipts.

Customers often called to dispute charges on their credit card, this was an expensive furniture store warehouse. So we would have to dig up those pallets with the fork lift and look for a single signed copy of the receipt to defend the charge. Sometimes, it took days to find. Other times, we never found the copies.

When I took over the warehouse, I installed photoshop on the main computer. IT gave me hell for it. Then I set up a batch job to scan those receipts into 3 parts: Full page, order number section, signature section. I used a .bat file to launch the OCR app that came with the printer and rename the files to include the order number. Now all I had to do at the end of the day, was stack the hundreds of receipt into the printer and watch the computers do my job.

When a customer complained, all I had to do was enter the order number in a dynamic excel sheet and the copy of the receipt was loaded. It took seconds. Everyone in the warehouse called me lazy. But they were happy to continue using my system. Although, the printer/scanner mysteriously broke after I left and they were forced to go back to the manual way.

And that was my first real world programming experience.

I like broken systems. Especially those that still manage to generate money. We all want to see clean code, written by sane people. But the reality is that it is rare. And when you meet clean code, there is a rigorous process that makes it nearly impossible to add new code/features.

I worked at such place that boasted security on the outside. From within, it was spit and duct tape. I couldn't believe it was a fortune 10. After couple of weeks working on one of the smaller projects, I created a new branch and called it rewrite.

When I had free time, I would rewrite the entire project from scratch. I really hated all the in line mysql connections in side_bar_bottom_new_v2.php. It took me a month to realize that I couldn't rewrite an application that was built over the course of 10 years, in my spare time. Only when I embraced it and took the time to understand how it was built, was I able to turn it into a secure app (messy, but still secure).

Now when I meet dysfunctional systems, I don't get mad. I challenge myself to figuring out what the heck it is doing.

Ah yes, crude indeed. We used to cut a small piece of payer, around an inch. Then fold it into a little square and place it inside that little empty square space on the front of the cassette tape. That's all it took to subvert it.

By the way this worked just as well for audio cassettes tape.

An advantage of RSS is that most companies that remove it, only remove the link from the website. Even bloggers who somehow feel the need to remove it, remove it from the share options but leave the link tag in the source code intact. The link remains functional.

The best technology are silent and boring.

My brother was the first driver employed in a brand new amazon warehouse. He shook hands with the manager and came home to tell us the good news. He was hired! His start date of the following week was rescheduled many times. In fact, it went from August to November.

The rest was a like landing in an island all by yourself. Nothing works, no one can help you, and you are on your own. Sometimes, he would just sit in the truck for a moment, holding his head together not knowing what to do. That was until the cameras were installed in the truck for them slackers.

The only way he managed to survive there was out the generosity of random old time drivers that he met on the street. They gave him the ropes, shared private WhatsApp group where they coordinate and help each other with tips and tricks.

Here is what you can do. Take an episode from The Simpsons in 2005, then take one that was released this year. Listen.

In the 2005 audio, the silent parts have grains. Both the sound effect and voice are almost at the same level. You don't spend your time constantly lowering and increasing the volume as music, sfx, and voice alternate.

Now in 2021, (or more like 2018 the last time I watched), it almost feels like the voice is on a different track. Unless you wear earphones, you will be smashing the volume button up and down from scene to scene.

With headphones, it sounds disconnected. You can feel the voice actors standing there in that empty soundproof room. The quality of the recording is so flawless that maybe you need studio monitors to hear. The home sound system doesn't cut it anymore.

The soundsystem of the future is subtitles.

oops, that was a typo. Fixed it.

Anecdata (only because I don't have access to the data anymore). Customer satisfaction is so much higher when they get a one click unsubscribe. In fact, when the friction is so low, the customer is likely to start the subscription back.

I say this as someone who worked in customer service automation. The worst customer satisfaction score with lowest rate of re-subscription is from companies that make it hell to unsubscribe.

I've seen customers send messages like "Cancel and refund immediately!" Since our response was ai driven, we cancel and refund no questions asked in less then a minute (we do fraud check in the background). Many times you get a response back from the customer apologizing for their tone and praising the product. Some of them restart the subscription a cycle or two later.

When you make it hard to cancel, you lose customers on the long term. Make it easy, in fact make it friendly. Unless you are selling a shady product, there is no reason to believe customers won't come back.

Edit: typo

A good friend of mine has been working on low resources NLP for a couple years now. A few months ago, he joined Mila Quebec AI Institute under Yoshua Bengio. Where it is hard to find transcribed audio, regular audio is just as hard to come by... Until you start mining all those forwarded audios on WhatsApp.

I used to get mad every time my mom would forward a 30 minutes audio that she knows I would delete before opening. And I used to delete them all. Now, I download the audio. Label the language it is in, and add it to my friends shared training data folder.

The governor's stance is just posture. "We take these matters seriously".

It reminds me of that time, a few years after I was out of college and into a job. My professor contacted me to demo my class project to her students. To give them an idea of what they can do with web development. Her assistant told me that they couldn't figure out how to run it.

Of course, I took a day off from work, opened back up my school project, fixed the annoying bug. The web page required IIS to run so I could make Ajax requests. I decided to hardcode the data in json instead. So I went to school to present my project.

The professor was double clicking the file and it wasn't displaying properly. I inserted my USB stick, and ran it from there instead. The coral reef restaurant website appeared on the big screen. I explained that I had to make some changes so it would work locally. Before, I was using a web server.

"Web server?" she shouted. "You are not allowed to use a web server. So you guys cheated!"

At first, I thought she was just kidding. I explained that Chapter 12 specifically asks to boot up IIS in order to make use of Ajax. During my time, the rest of the class stopped at chapter 10. I completed the entire book because I was just in love with learning JavaScript. So unless you get to chapter 12, you don't learn about Ajax.

"I'll have to report you. They board might revoke your grade. Not just you but all your group."

You can only imagine how pale I became. But I understood what was happening. She had tried to run the project multiple times and failed. She couldn't debug it or figure out the issue. To save face in front of the class, she accused me of having cheated. This is the exact thing the Missourians officials are doing.

No, at the end of the day my grades were not revokes. Plus I had dropped out of college and was working in the field for a few couple years already. But it goes to show you the length people would go just to save face.

On a serious note, the G in FAANG is for Alphabet.

Interestingly enough, I watched this growing up in Saudi Arabia. In the late 80s, early 90s there were only 2 TV channels.

Channel 1 was in Arabic. Channel 2 was mostly English and had a lot of old school American programs. We watched sesame streets, the electric company, old episodes of Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes.

I can't say it taught me how to read, but it taught me English for sure.

> Take the detective character Fargo North, Decoder (get it?), who would solve missing letter mysteries. "Kids don't know Fargo, North Dakota," Fowles points out.

There was a show my wife watched when she was a kid in Florida. One of the main character was called LaCienega Boulevardes. It sounded like any other name. Until a couple years ago she moved to California. She started laughing hysterically when we drove on La Cienega Blvd.

> echo json_encode($search_results);

This is how I found out how much I, and all other contractors were being paid. And also how much the contracting company was actually charging the clients. All the data was being returned in a json but the very little was being displayed.

Looking at the story, this is more of a posture thing. I'm sure the Governor is surrounded with people who can tell him that no hacking took place, but why miss an opportunity to show you take the privacy of Missourians to heart.

You have summarized my first two months at a new job.

I joined as a lead and spend a good deal of time in meetings where they discuss new features and tasks. Before the meeting, I open the company's acronym cheatsheet just to be able to keep up. Then after a long monologue from a manager that ends with "Any questions," I'm the guy who asks: "What's <product-name>?"

It sucks because I appear incompetent. But it has also helped us onboard people better. One of the first tasks I assigned to my team was to update the README.md files of all code bases they touch. It might seem obvious to the old timers what everything does, they have spend years working on it. But to the avalanche of new developers they are hiring, a code base that has code and no description is a source of confusion.

Seriously, as someone who does not use Facebook because I think it is harmful, I think we should put ourselves in his shoes for a second. There is no right way to answer Facebook scale questions, seriously.

What would you do?

In 2003, I was chatting with a schoolmate and I sent him a file. It arrived instantly.

Him: Oh my God, that was fast

Me: I know. I have super fast internet.

Him: Ha, what's your internet speed?

Me: 3 MBps.

Him: That's literally not even possible.

I was kidding of course, it must have been a fluke or the stars were aligned just right. We were both on Dial up. So yeah, my slow 100 Mb/s internet at home today is plenty fast. I wouldn't even know what to do with a Tb/s.

I feel for everyone who isn't a good writer and doesn't succeed in getting featured on HN homepage. (writing > coding)

Realistically, we need automation to handle most cases. But that means false positives. And their needs to be a better channel than HN or being famous on twitter to get issues resolved.

Before the coup that happened a few days ago, my country was casually known as a dictatorship. You don't insult politicians, not especially on a public place. When you are home, you check if the coast is clear before you call the president names. Otherwise you get an armed and humiliating response, if not tragic.

Looks like lots of democratic countries are looking at us with envy and for inspiration these days.

There is a demo video on twitter: https://twitter.com/facebookai/status/1435733478516133892